I got an interesting question from my girlfriend last week: Given I have a list of numbers, I want to select a subset of numbers that added up matches closest to a specific (positive) value. Let me give a simplified example to explain what she was asking for: If our list is [12, 79, 99, 91, 81, 47] and the expected value is 150, it should return [12, 91, 47] as 12+91+47 is 150. If our list is [15, 79, 99, 6, 69, 82, 32] and the expected value is 150 it should return [69, 82] as 69+82 is 151, and there is no subset whose sum is 150. This turns out to be known as the Subset sum problem and is a computational hard problem to solve. Luckily the list of numbers she needs to work with is quite small (about 50 numbers) and we can easily brute force this. Today I want to show you how we can tackle this problem in Excel using the Solver add-in. Activate the Solver Add-In: Go to the "File" tab. Click on "Options." In the Excel Opti...